1894 - was there an app for that?

Published 4:14 pm, Monday, September 10, 2012

Miss Nora started working for Southwestern Bell Telephone company in 1898 as a switchboard operator on vintage phones shown.

Miss Nora started working for Southwestern Bell Telephone company in 1898 as a switchboard operator on vintage phones shown.

Photo: Enterprise File Photo

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An operator at central switchboard at Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. in 1916.

An operator at central switchboard at Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. in 1916.

Photo: Enterprise File Photo

1894 - was there an app for that?

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SOUTHEAST TEXAS TALES

One hundred and eighteen years ago, in a small tan, two-story, wooden building on Pine Street, Beaumont's first telephone exchange was established.

It was 1894, the same year the first battery-operated telephone switchboard was installed in Lexington, Mass., Coca-Cola was first sold in bottles and the modern Olympics were born in Paris.

Within four years, 91 people had subscribed to the magneto telephone service in Beaumont, which Southwestern Telegraph and Telephone company had purchased for $4,000, according to The Enterprise archives.

It's a far cry from today's telephone usage statistics, which show that more of today's phone users are of the cellular sort and the number of home phone users is continually dropping.

During the last half of 2008, about 20 percent of U.S. households had only cell phones, compared with about 17 percent of households with only landlines.

That's a significant difference from the first six months of 2003, when 3 percent of households had only wireless phones and 43 percent had only landlines, according to the study.

But in the early 1900s in Beaumont, the only option for telephone service was to get in touch with Miss Nora or one of the other switchboard operators, known as "hello girls."

A 1955 Enterprise news story says Miss Nora, as she was known during her 27 years with the phone company, worked from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day - except for the third Sunday of the month, which she had off. She earned $15 a month, but no one complained, she said in the article.

She knew most everyone's numbers by heart and everything worked smoothly until oil was discovered at Spindletop, luring thousands of people to the once quiet but prosperous little sawmill community. After that it was not uncommon for a person to wait a full day or two before his turn to connect his call came.

"Miss Nora says many a time people came to the telephone exchange and offered to buy her handsome presents if she would hurry this or that long distance call through for them," the 1955 article states. "Telephone lines were strung up to serve the bustling new oil field as fast as materials and men became available. Then, Miss Nora chuckles, the trouble really began."

But that wasn't the first time the switchboard operators had their work cut out for them.

As many people today can attest, a hurricane makes you want to check in with your relatives on the coast in any way possible. The Galveston storm of 1900 produced the same compulsion, except again the only way to reach people in a hurry was by phone.

"Well, the switchboards were plain on fire," said Mrs. O.J. Leicht, another "hello girl" interviewed in 1955. "We girls couldn't get through the high water areas to our homes, so we just slept on cots in the office, working the boards for five- or six-hour stretches."

That continued for three days straight.

They managed to get a little rest before they had to handle another disaster a few years later.

A huge fire at Gladys Station near the Spindletop oil field in 1903 caused hundreds of calls to Beaumont from out-of-towners "which bogged down the boards good and proper," Leicht said. "All of us girls remained right there at our posts for 24 hours until the excitement finally died down.